Review of Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971) by Jason R — 17 Aug 2011

As you might expect, this is an odd little movie. First of all, the title is totally inappropriate. The movie is not, as its name suggests, the story of a school prank gone wrong. Indeed, the heroine is as much the victim of her own tortured psyche as she is the target of any kind of nefarious plot. This movie could switch names with another horror film: "Carrie" could rightly be called "Let's Scare Carrie to Death," which would accurately reflect the way that Carrie is harassed by nearly everyone she knows, and this movie could be simply called "Jessica," as the heroine and the actress are at the heart of the film. Second, that actress, Zohra Lampert, is quite good in a difficult role, but she's also head-and-shoulders above her compatriots. The affect of her excellent performance against the backdrop of a bunch of amateur acting and poor screenwriting is disorienting, and I doubt it's intentional. The key to the film is our belief in Jessica's fragile mental state, her sense of isolation, and the fear of impending persecution. Lampert makes Jessica an effective character, but she's not given much help.

The movie is also an interesting, if largely uneven, intersection of several genres and trends that were popular at the moment. Horror films enjoyed a good run after "Psycho," peaking with the religiously-themed gross out success of "The Exorcist." "Let's Scare" also evokes Herschel Gordon Lewis's Southern redneck gore fests, and, to a lesser extent, the psycho-sexual atmosphere of Russ Meyer's less comedic films, like the fascinating "Lorna." The threesome (turned foursome) of characters are also hippies, pointing to larger social trends that diffused through cinema in various ways. It's also entirely unclear whether the monstrous supernatural beings that haunt Jessica are vampires, zombies, or some ambiguous combination thereof. They bite, but they don't leave fang marks. In the place of such scars are long, knife-like incisions. If they are vampires, there's no attempt whatsoever to evoke the typical trappings of such narratives, such as the vampire's need to hide from the sun. If they're zombies, they're nothing like the undead characters in Romero's influential cycle. This is probably the only movie ever in which a mole is considered a potentially adorable pet. It is, of course, stabbed to death. Tune in for the weird period touches, but stick around for Lampert's unexpectedly touching embodiment of paranoia and delusion.